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Making Memeries is a new artist’s book by Lucas Blalock. It is published on the occasion of a travelling installation of the same name, commissioned by Self Publish, Be Happy.

Born from an interest in exploring the shifting boundaries of virtual space in the contemporary world, Making Memeries is the first photobook of its kind to engage Augmented Reality. Featuring a new series of photographs by Blalock, each image in the book can be ‘activated’ via an app that is downloaded to readers’ mobile phones or tablets. AR technology expands the experience of each photograph using sound, 3D renderings and animation.

Scanning a phone’s screen across the surface of each image brings it alive as pictures transform, push beyond their frame, or disappear. Each new spread becomes an interactive exercise in visual association, imagination and understanding. Making Memeries presents an incongruous experience, and arouses curiosity in viewers to question what is real and what is not in the world around them.

Standing at over 30cm in height, with full bleed images and thick board pages that can be laid out completely flat, Making Memeries takes its form from early age children’s books. In the way that such books are designed to familiarise young readers with the world around them through colour, number object and shape, Making Memeries could be said to engage viewers of all ages in a new world somewhere between on and offline; conflating the virtual and the tangible.

In today’s digital age, our image environment is constantly changing, flourishing and rapidly adapting to new generations of technological possibility. It is not enough anymore to know how to read images; we need to learn how to live with them too.